THE TURNING POINT. FROM PSYCHOBIOLOGY TO OBJECT-RELATIONS

Chapter 2 traced the struggle throughout Freud’s work between the physicalistic type of scientific thought in which he had been trained and the need for a new type of psychodynamic thinking that he was destined to create. The first, or process theory, approach was enshrined in his instinct theory, which still persists even now in much of psychoanalytic terminology and writing: although his original quantitative theory of pleasure and unpleasure as physical processes determining all human action occurs now as no more than an occasional echo of the past.